Daniel Borzutzky, Arbitrary Tales (Ravenna Press, 2007)"'History, we are taught, is arbitrary, if there is any enjoyment to be derived from it, it is in the playfulness of its constant revision.(Daniel Borzutzky)
In his Arbitrary Tales, Daniel Borzutzky does not withhold from us the pleasures of narrative; for he does relate, in many of his texts - perhaps most of them - stories that have anecdotal intention, in addition to temporal and spatial extension. The tales are crowded with incidents and characters set against contemporary or medieval landscapes (or their cunning admixture), which receive from their creator sufficient specificity to make them real; i.e. they have the weight of fictitious place. Even in the case of
Little villages made entirely of dust and lint
Borzutzky's places have a Max Ernst-like strange familiarity, or familiar strangeness.
Incidents and characters are caused to proliferate to an astonishing degree and in an amazing diversity of forms. One is led to the inescapable conclusion that Borzutzky has elevated the notion of mutation and its corollary, morphology, to the principal theme of this work. (Are they not, in themselves, the essence of narrative art - of all art and of architecture, details of which latter discipline Borzutzky frequently imports into his fictions?) Borzutzky appropriates non-narrative forms, like the dramatic or operatic, for some of his tales, which have an enlarging and expansive effect, within the context of the whole. The identification and transmutation of form - social, with its insistence on ceremony (also significant to this writer), entomological and zoological organisms - these activities lie at the heart of Borzutzky's fiction.
He kissed her lips. She turned into a rat, then a flowerpot, then a story.
Like Raymond Roussel and Harry Mathews, Borzutzky claims for his at once spacious and cramped stories more freedom than readers of conventional fiction may be willing to allow. Like those two antecedent makers of writings, and like others we may admire, such as Donald Barthelme, Bruno Schulz, Kafka, Henri Michaux, and Kenneth Koch, Borzutzky is a fabulist, who constructs often brilliant machines, whose sole purpose seems, to us, to be to confound expectations of psychological or sociological depth; indeed, the tales avoid anything that might be called subtext. They are without metaphor. They are shallow in the Modernist sense that they adore the surface possibilities of art. Borzutzky's texts propose colorful inventions whose purpose is delight. This delight is abundantly ours in "An Arbitrary Tale," "Bed Time with William James," "The Lonely Man," or "How We Celebrate the Arrival of Spring," in which we are given a line that might well serve as statement of a theme concerning all the Arbitrary Tales: . . . it becomes increasingly obvious that the room is not one room but several rooms, that the world is not one world but several worlds, and that geometry and physics, though helpful, in the long run, can do little more than confuse us.
Not that each text is successful. The final two pieces in the collection, "War" and "Uncle Alberto in Exile," to our mind misfire in their implacable unspooling of narrative thread and, in the case of the second text, an experiment in sound that finally proves tedious.
At his best, Borzutzky composes fictions that are ravishing in the immaculate sentences with which they are constructed, in their verbal legerdemain, their rhythmic certainty, and in their primordial and human wish to elaborate a universe created entirely of words that is at least as bewildering and bewitching as that which is called real. Ultimately, we turn away from the contemplation of life and Borzutzky's art, knowing that:
We understood that we could not understand, and that this was the appeal of the wilderness.
For readers who wish to enter an inimitable wilderness of stories in order to pleasure in fiction's capacity to transfix and transfigure a man's experience, I recommend Arbitrary Tales." - Norman Lock
"It’s hard to say just how “arbitrary” the tales in Daniel Borzutzky’s first collection really are—the title begs to be taken ironically, and the first piece, “The History of Rights,” obliges. In it, the characters, all “brutal ruffians,” rough one another up, chanting “My lord is a big, brutal ruffian and his Godmen are bigger than your Godmen.” It’s a parable about the relationship between human aggression, imperialism, and organized religion that reads like something Daniil Kharms might have written if he hadn’t had Stalin to worry about.
As soon as we adjust to the idea of reading a volume of clever allegories, however, we come across the first of two stories entitled “An Arbitrary Tale,” in which a “genetically engineered dark-haired golden girl” encounters “a green martian with a dead squirrel around her neck.” From there the collection runs playfully amok, confronting ideology and the lack thereof, and appropriating, sometimes demolishing, received literary forms. In one story, William James “mowed the lawn each night wearing long pants, knee-high boots, a football helmet, and a pair of goggles”; in another, reminiscent of Gertrude Stein’s operas, a wax bust of Napoleon sings a litany of historical figures who “never meant shit to me”; and the final story, “Uncle Alberto in Exile,” crams as much narrative tension into 13 pages as you’re likely to find in some whole novels.
All of this experimentation might seem intimidating, or even tiresome, but Borzutzky’s prose is clean and often deadpan, and behind all of the calculation, there is a tenderness that allows one character to declare that he is “unable to deal with the pain of discovering that people hurt each other” and another to tell his lover “how nice it is to have someone to tell my stories to” without sentimentality—perhaps because the former is immediately snapped in the crotch and the latter subsequently renames God “Gork.”
Arbitrary indeed, then, though Tales is another issue altogether. The reader looking for an easy moral or a tidy denouement is likely to be disappointed by “Eight Unfinished Narratives,” not just because the narratives are incomplete, but because they’re juxtaposed in a list of 20 without indication of where one begins and another ends, leaving us to wonder whether Mother Earth’s etymology of the word “copulate” has anything to do with the man who “awoke one morning from uneasy dreams and found himself transformed into a cash register.”
There is one perspective, however, from which the term “tales” is undeniably appropriate — they’re nearly all told, as opposed to shown. And while there are times that the telling becomes tedious, as in “How We Celebrate the Arrival of Spring” and “War,” a pair of stories which document the quasi-religious civic celebrations of imaginary villages in such minute detail that they risk banality, it’s refreshing to see a young writer reject the first workshop commandment without fanfare and succeed so often." - Christian TeBordo
Daniel Borzutzky, The Ecstasy of Capitulation (BlazeVOX Books, 2006)"One can say about Daniel Borzutzky's The Ecstasy of Capitulation what has rarely been said about poetry since the beginning of modernism: it's a hell of a lot of fun. That's under the assumption, of course, that one enjoys the occasional verbal crudity—which is also a precursor for enjoying Borzutzky's poems. Inheritor of postmodernity's ambivalence towards language, meaning, and sincerity, Borzutzky's genius is to build instead on tone, relativist interpretations of historical events, and fetishized eros.
Raised in Pittsburg, bilingual child of Chilean parents, Borzutzky's migratory family history, passing through a continent which has produced generations of politically radical poets, is perhaps one of the things which prevents him from straying into complete absurdism. For contemporary poets, this is not merely a matter of taste, but a struggle with the aftermath of Theory. “Especially among young poets,” Tony Hoagland writes, “there is a widespread mistrust of narrative forms, and, in fact, a pervasive sense of the inadequacy or exhaustion of all modes other than the associative.” The lyric "I" still exists, but only in a stew of dissociated nouns and verbs. Even when content is couched in full context, poems resist discursiveness by turning away into image or absurdity. In a language already ravished by the vernacular of corporatization, bureaucratization, medicalization, and high technology, poets no longer ask themselves how something should be said, but whether anything can be said at all—resorting to fractured narratives and fractured syntax in the face of postmodernity's nihilism and relativism.
Structuring a poem becomes difficult when we can count on neither content nor the meanings of words themselves. There are many options, one of which is to simply embrace postmodernism's inherent aesthetic—and the itinerant political implications of cultural relativism. Borzutzky prefers instead to work subtly against postmodernism. His syntactic strategies mirror closely those of absurdist poets, but he cleverly injects thin strings of narrative, using historical events and speakers, and the tone of these speakers, to give his poems coherence. His specialty is a manic, obsessive jargon peppered with legalisms, bureaucratic and corporate newspeak, and a positively twenty-first century fanaticism. “Almost unnoticed,” the speaker declares in “Sharp Teeth of Death: An Essay on Poets and their Poetics,” “poets have continuously battled the human race for domination of the earth.” It's the kind of hyperbole you'd expect from Jerry Falwell, Joseph McCarthy, or the mentally flaccid man who was my high school principal:
[P]oets not only inflict social but economic losses on their human enemy by robbing them of food they may need for survival.
There is no question that civilization's worst enemy is the poet, who outdoes all wild beasts in destruction of lives and property. Poets cause more damage than all other tyrants combined.
The savage officialism of the speaker, given over to this ridiculous topic (who, after all, could imagine poets agreeing long enough to inflict “economic losses”), is positively reinvigorating. The speaker's tone, which we all recognize from Fox News, from Hollywood's stock fanatics, and from our daily lives, should we happen to live in a rural area, is the real connective tissue of these poems.
And, it's hilarious.
The poems are strongest when structured by an historical or social context. It is in these poems where Borzutzky's talent for humor shines, and it is these poems at which a casual, non-writerly audience roars with laughter. In “Ronald Reagan in Berlin,” President Reagan begins his public address with: “Dear Mr. Gorbachev, if we are together/ Again do not spank me upon my bare buttocks.”
Reagan goes on to describe the effects of such spanking, and to describe an elaborate dream in which he was “a stallion who produced both male and female/ Sex hormones,” the First Lady Nancy was “a castrated male dog/ Who attempted to nurse young puppies,” and Mr. Gorbachev was:
a caponed hen who ceased
To crow, grew a cocks-comb and attempted
Husbandry with other hens.
Reagan describes how, in the dream, he, Nancy, and Mr. Gorbachev are able to converse with a variety of creatures: “ducks,/ Geese, puppies, rabbits, kittens, and chipmunks,” as well as “sails, worms, beetles, and toads.” Delightfully, the poem does not forsake its origins, but doubles back to the original 1987 speech and its memorable lines:
Liberalization,
Mr. Gorbachev, is how we were able to understand
The language of these little animals. Tear down this
Wall, Mr. Gorbachev. Thank you, and God bless you all.
The humor of such a poem, beyond the sexual uber-fantasies, is the staging, the fact that Reagan delivers his emasculating speech to the citizens and government officials of West Berlin and all who listen from the other side of the wall and by radio or television. Notice that in this poem, Borzutzky is at once postmodern and not. He has fractured narrative, by offering a reinterpretation of Reagan's original speech, which is a typical relativist technique. Yet he uses the tone of the speaker and the absurd narrative formed by the speaker's sexual fantasy to formulate a second, complete narrative—which is opposed to the contemporary postmodern aesthetic manifest in pure absurdism. Borzutzky knows that his poem lives because the original speech exists as an historical event.
One fad of postconfessional poets still closely affiliated with narrative has been to write beautifully-crafted, ahistorical poems featuring historical figures, especially artists, scientists, and musicians. The assumption is that, while recent history is now a matter of relativist interpretation, Renaissance history, Romance history, ancient Greek history, and even the first few centuries of capitalist industrialization exist forever in a series of picturesque freeze-frames safely preceding deconstruction's wall of flame. Borzutzky is not one of these. He ranges too far afield of sincerity. And his poems depend heavily on the history they deconstruct. In the end, he is too loyal to historical narrative to entirely disclaim it.
Yet Ecstasy is not a book of protest or even analysis. The bombast in “Richard Milhous Nixon's First Inagural Address” is not a politicized characterization of Nixon. It is play, funmaking, the strategy of which is to exaggerate—with the tone of public speech and a clever modification of content—the simpleminded hypocrisy we now accept in all public figures:
I ask you to share with me today the majesty of squirrel-headed otters.
...
The spiraling evolution of humanity allows us the possibility of combining animals, of unions between gorillas and hippos, advances that once would have taken centuries.
Additional poems make blasphemous use of the vernacular of economics: “Oh Fidelity Low-Priced Mutual Fund, stick things in me/ as I stick things in you.” “Inflationary Module” from “Desire: 7 Modules,” is a brilliant combination of economic jargon and fetishized eros:
I want to make it with you, baby,
but misguided central planning
has led to a pervasive misallocation of capital.
The central bank is closed, baby,
and I cannot make a deposit.
And one must address the sexual content of Ecstasy. It's about time someone rescued sex from sentimental, heterosexual, Confessional poets. It's about time someone treated sex like the game it's become. Like Borzutzky's approach to capitalized, corporatized diction, his use of sexual fantasy is refreshingly hyperbolic, so over the top that taking it seriously might cause mental strain. Sex, like meaning and Marxism, has become a kind of non-content under postmodernism—a Flash ad in the header of a Web site, a billboard passed every day on the morning commute. Gen-X-ers are accustomed to sex talk, accustomed to Dan Savage and leather stores and cock rings and the need to articulate one's preferred sub-genre of porn. Borzutzky's eros isn't shocking so much as timely.
Sometimes absurdity gets the better of a poem, and the slew of tangential nouns and verbs renders it unwieldy. Like a magnet dragged across a junkyard accumulating nuts, bolts, nails, washers, and cast-off droplets of welded metal, eventually the magnet itself is no longer visible. Some poems of Ecstasy still struggle with postmodern dissociation. “The news/ says the news has disappeared,” reports the speaker of “Away.” “Simple Present” attempts the following lines:
I only think of you when I do not
think of you. Conversely, when I
think of you, I do not think of you.
There is nothing, of course, wrong with such poems, except for the fact that they have been written, by various authors, several thousand times since the Surrealists had their start in the 1920s. Terry Eagleton describes the “postmodern consensus against norms, unities and consensus” in After Theory. “In this social order, then, you can no longer have bohemian rebels or revolutionary avant-gardes because they no longer have anything to blow up.” Language poetry and absurdism, one might conjecture from such a statement, rally against the long-dead bourgeois of Baudelaire. Far more interesting are the poems where Borzutzky opposes postmodern aesthetics—and succeeds.
Also, it's a hell of a lot of fun." - Amy Groshek
Daniel Borzutzky, one size fits all (Scantily Clad Press, 2009)
Read it at: http://issuu.com/andrewlundwall/docs/danielborzutzky-onesizefitsall
"Daniel Borzutzky’s echap, one size fits all, published by Scantily Clad Press, opens with a dramatic bang of phallic imagery with, "In My Numb heart a Priack of Misgiving." References to Milton seep out through Borzutzky’s dry sardonic humor: “The best poet in our town lives in a cage at PetsRUs and says fuck the son of a bitch every time a customer walks by.” the prick of misgiving being the parrot at the pet store repeating, "fuck the son of a bitch…." "Crazy Jane Finds a Dog" is engaging and awesome: "looking onto this land of piss, I exalt… my own lethargy… Hide with the white bitch in the mud, praying not to be devoured." We have the alchemy of trash and sewage. The ending, "Now that I take care of the white bitch, I have gained the respect of my family," proves you don’t have to be a winner to win.
Borzutzky’s poetry is a strange exotic and eclectic conglomerate of words. I read and wonder, who is this dude? Sometimes I understand what he is saying from one sentence to the next and other times I sit there wondering if I have any idea. Sometimes a sentence follows the thoughts and sequence of the one before; sometimes it doesn’t. I don’t exactly know what to do, so I follow along because he’s strange enough to make me want to. Although I read the lines in bewilderment I laugh and feelings are aroused.
I laugh at certain lines then go back to the last line trying to figure how it fits. I read and reread "In My Numb heart a Prick of Misgiving."
"If you cannot sex this poem then listen harder.
The wind has fallen."
I visualize the scenario from his poems with his unique illustrations and I treasure his concepts like the one discussed above in "Crazy Jane"; you don’t have to be a winner to win. From the title poem, "one size fits all," I see: "The poet forgot to shake off his penis and pee dripped on the manuscript that he submitted to the 2007 University of Iowa Poetry Prize" combines poetic masturbation with pissing in the wind. Sometimes you may as well scratch your ass instead of your head for all the good anything will do you in society’s grip.
Mr. Borzutzky has trapped me and remade me in his image. This collection is written for the poet exorcising familiar demons in spurts of more traditional views and references. The general notion being if you haven't lived it how could you possibly write about it and if you did live it would you be crazy enough to write it and if you did write it would anybody understand or read it... right? I laugh and go back to what I read before. I think that could be me, that is me he’s talking about not only himself. I relate to the artist’s lament about how the industry prostitutes ethics.
"The problem, said the critic, remains one of imagination and its insistence on the distinction between thought and action." We all have to live with criticism, poets especially, since strong and different works always raise suspicions and hard penises. "Poetry lives here, she replied, but he will chop you up and kill you, and then he’ll cook you and eat you," along with attachable and detachable prosthetics to demonstrate how we either give or shed an artificial piece of ourselves — very unique imagery and this is what makes Borzutzky more cool. A daring risk-taker appeals to me. "I vomit a poem onto a stack of bloody cows and win a Pushcart prize." I do understand — I think I do…
"Budget Cuts" makes a similar point: "And the semen are in their testicles and Hamlet is a faceless robot who is president of the rotary," and I can’t say why it makes me smile. The point is poets are poor – we don’t make money off of what we love to do. Pity…
one size fits all closes with "Suddenly I was old, and had no one to fucking talk to," the classic death of the poet. Borzutzky outright admits that poetry becomes the property of the reader once published... woohoo :), I like that! "I do not own this poem; it is the responsibility of the poetic community." And, "If you can’t feel the tickle on your genitals that this poem provides, please masturbate safely within the confines of rubber walls and maybe then size won’t matter."
What I like the most is that Daniel Borzutzky does not fit the mold. I like his differences, the folly and play in his voice, his humor and sarcasm; I feel his triumph and growth develop. The voice of Marguerite Duras mixes with Milton and “the colored girls go.” I can ask for no more; I’m getting all the visceral stimulation I need." - Joy Leftow
